July 19, 2007

Hot Dog Chili Sauce Linked to Botulism

Botulism is a bacteria that causes paralysis in people that contract it. And apparently four people - two in Texas, a pair of siblings, and two in Indiana, an adult couple - contracted it from hot dog chili sauce. MMM, that's good chili!
The Strib's coverage sought out spokespeople from the Centers for Disease Control, Castleberry foods co. (the company that made the chili con carnage) and the FDA.
Apparently this is baffling that it happened to canned foods, because they usually heat the canned goods up to such a temperature as to kill the botulinim spores.
The spokesman for Castleberry foods was their Senior V.P. of marketing, which i thought was weird. Does that mean he's like the chief P.R. guy, or that he heads up their advertising? i dunno. I thought maybe there was someone else that could've been talked to at Castleberry, or its parent, Bumble Bee Seafoods LLC, based out in San Diego.
The article listed out the UPCs for the contaminated chili cans, always a good thing.
It was an AP article, so i didn't find any different information when i looked it up at CNN.com. Although there they didn't list out the UPCs.
About 25 cases of botulism are reported each year, but they come from home-canned goods. Again, that's why people at Castleberry and the CDC are going, "hey, wha' happened?"

June 28, 2007

Yay! The Bald Eagle!

Every newspaper Web site i went to had a headline for this story. The Interior Department removed the Bald Eagle from the list of endangered species. Yay! This comes after forty years of the bird (with help from its fellow patriots) struggling for survival. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne had a ceremony for this outside of the Jefferson Memorial in D.C.There are about 10,000 of the birds on the continent. compare that to 417, which was how many there were in 1963. Kempthorne is promising it'll never happen again.
The birds' numbers dropped so low because they were targeted by hunters, and were susceptible to DDT. but get this, since 1940 it's been federal law that it's illegal to kill a bald eagle. Wisconsin has a similar thing, it's illegal to kill a badger.